The winter hiatus is over! Supernatural is coming back tonight on CW. The collective sigh echoed throughout fandom is heard even in Twitterland: #TheBoysAreBack was reportedly among the top 10 trending topic this morning until it was blocked. The "funny" thing is I'm so used to long drawn out hiatus from watching Battlestar Galactica, two months of waiting felt like nothing to me these days.

Still, I'm excited. And I've been thinking about the show and season 5 lately, especially after seeing the Favorite Scene picspam by layne67 last night. In particular, I was pondering over my favorite episode "The End" and the mid season cliffhanger "Abandon All Hopes" (note both episodes are written by Ben Edlund) when a small light bulb went off in my head:

WARNING: 5.04 & 5.10 spoilers alert -- A burning question from 5.04 for me is whether or not the future that Dean saw is real and inevitable? The parting shot Lucifer!Sam left for Dean was particularly troublesome (He said: Whatever you do, you will always end up... here. No matter what choices you make, whatever details you alter, *we* will always end up... here.). The "here" Lucifer!Sam was talking about of course was Dean's death resulted from his failed attempt in killing Lucifer with the Colt.

Now fast forward to 5.10. An important truefax we (as well as the protagonists) learned in this episode is that the Colt cannot harm Lucifer. With that in mind, that particular slice of "future" in 5.04 where the protagonists plotted to kill Lucifer!Sam with the Colt is no longer valid. Why would these Resistance Fighters plan an assault with a weapon they knew to be useless, right? So is it true we have it implied in canon that Lucifer!Sam's claim on the future is false?!

Me too. I also believe that nothing about the future is set in stone. It's that old debate of whether there is a destiny or not. From the characters' POVs, I see Dean thinks it's a load of crap, whereas Sam tends to give more credence to his supposed fate.

About 5.04 and 5.10 I think it's going backward. Because present!Dean saw in 5.04 that future!Dean tried to kill Lucifer with the Colt, present!Dean then tried to find the Colt to kill Lucy in 5.10. But then either present or future!Dean knew yet that the gun couldn't kill Lucy. I think that's what you call paradox in time when you make time travel. You might change the future by seeing what the future is like when you happen to travel to the future. Confusing much? I am confused. :D

I thought paradox in time travel is when what in the future changes the past, kinda like anti-time (like it described in Star Trek: TNG).

In this case however, I think the future (Dean's failing in terminate Lucifer with the Colt) didn't change the past in that up until he shot Lucifer with the Colt, Dean didn't know Lucifer is immune to the famed gun. Thus in 5.10 he still went after the devil with the weapon, even at the cost of Jo and Ellen's lives. But after the events of 5.10 which chronologically came before the future!Events of 5.04, I cannot imagine Dean would mount another attack on Lucifer with the useless weapon. Thus the "future" Dean witnessed in 5.04 cannot happen anymore by my logic.

I've always thought that the 'future' is only Zach's screwing with Dean's head. So things that happen might not what really happens in the future. It's all lying. Yeah, back to my argument, Dean is going after the Colt in 5.10 because of what he experiences in 5.04.

By just getting together with Sam is not enough to prove Dean changed the future he saw in 5.04. After all, that can be construed as the "detail" Lucifer!Sam was talking about.

However, I think by learning the extent of Lucifer's strength at first hand in 5.10 does change what could or could not happen in the future Dean saw in 5.04. Logically, that planned attack on Lucifer with the Colt would no longer happen imo. Now that doesn't necessarily mean Sam won't say yes to Lucifer, or Lucifer won't kill Dean. But at the very least, Dean wouldn't die at Lucifer!Sam's feet with the smoking gun (Colt) lying next to him, I think.

Do you watch Flash Forward? The story revolves around people who see their future 6 months from now, and subsequent events led them to believe that they cannot change the future, whatever they do. One man, he saw in his vision that he killed a woman leaving her small children orphans. He was so depressed by it ( he's a good man ) that he jumped from a building, killing himself. His last words to his friends who tried to save him, "We can change the future." Or something like that.

And of course I remember what Lucifer!Sam said. Oh I know what happened in another show had nothing to do with SPN, but for some odd reasons, it gave me hope ...

Heh, I don't watch many TV shows these days. One fandom is already too much for me to handle. The only other show I casually & regularly watch these days is "The Mentalist". *sigh*

But I'll be checking out "White Collar" soon. Do you know a fellow SPN fan lomer is going to be on it next Tuesday? She's in this one scene in the upcoming episode. She's also booked for "Law & Order" I believe, so I'd check out that episode as well.

Back to "are future set in stone" discussion. Personally I believe we make our own destiny (a la Dean here). However I also see Supernatural has a tendency to show things happen no matter what the protagonists do. Case in point: "Mystery Spot" and "Monster at the End of This Book". That's why even though I would like to think the future Dean saw in 5.04 won't happen, Lucifer's parting words doth worry me...that is, until the end of 5.10, after I realized what the protagonists learned from that experience.

The most famous time-travel paradox is probably the Grandfather Paradox, but I think the scenario described in Robert Heinlein's By His Bootstraps is closer to what transpired in SPN 5.04. In this story, the present and future versions of the protagonist all interact with each other to produce the events, leading him to conclude these events must all exist in a closed temporal loop and are therefore non-causal.

There are many attempts to resolve these paradoxes. The multiverse (parallel universe) depicted in Trek is only one of the hypotheses on how to get around the problem, but I don't think SPN - with God and Devil - will use that particular solution.

There is a hypothesize that says the only possible timelines are those that are entirely self-consistent, i.e., a timeline where a man who travels back in time to kill his own grandpa (before the grandpa met the grandma) has probability of zero. In an important sense, this supports the concept of destiny, and I think it makes some sense for SPN to take this route.

The irony, to me, is that this second theory was proposed by a physicist. Who says one cannot prove the existence of God? ;)

(In other news, I am considering changing jobs, in which case I'll get a couple of months off and hence stay longer. As such I'm postponing the trip to CA pending the decision.)

Back to SPN, my take on 5.04 Lucifer!Sam's whatever you do etc was "we'll always end up with broth-against-brother" - that I think is one of the signs of Apocalypse, and the colt is just one of the "details" with no impact on Destiny.

Of course, one cannot trust the devil. SPN, being American TV, will tell us the importance of "free will" - we can change the future. So Dean may still be safe ;)